A Hunger that Swims a Black Ocean
by Goblin Cat KC
Summary: After their defeat of the subterranean fungal monstrosity, Donatello discovers that its spores are a gateway to the real threat, a strange, unknowable beast devouring anything that moves... As they struggle to discover a way to save themselves, Donatello and Leonardo must hold very, very still. As seen in The Darknest Night's TMNT fanbook. Warnings: ambiguous ending, Lovecraftian.


Do not move! Do not move!

If I am not here to explain, then you must simply trust me. Running will not help you. The spores are already inside you. Your previous exposure merely requires more time to reveal itself. I can only hope that I have progressed far enough in my experiment to save you.

Do not move!

Finish the chemical formula on my desk and drink it. I am certain of its properties now. It is your only salvation. I would not have guessed it before, but I understand—I think I understand the true nature of the spores now. The true nature of reality.

No matter what, you must not move!

I must be insane or very near it now. I must be, and yet I still ask you to trust me.

Words cannot describe the paroxysms of fear that have slowly engulfed my mind and brought me to the brink, indeed the very precipice of sanity. Only my adherence to rational science sustains me now, the ironclad compass that brings laws and order to a universe I now find toppling headlong into eldritch realms of chaos and madness.

But is it rationality that forces my actions? Is it rationality that demands I mix drug after drug to burn out the insanity that has taken root in my mind? Is it rational that I test my vile concoctions on my older brother—

My poor brother!

Even now he sits by my side, fitful in his sleep, whispering how close the monstrous presence came in his dream. He swears that he still believes it is a dream, but who can claim now what is dream and what is waking?

My family—if we are gone when you come home to find this, then know at least that our ends were swift and painless, though terror-filled. If I could have called to you, I would have, but I cannot find my voice even if I had the means. I am hoarse from shrieks. My brother no longer even speaks, responding to nothing but my presence, and even then only to grasp at me when I move.

Even now he can only think to save my life. I who have brought us to ruin.

It is my own potent curiosity that damned us. I should never have attempted to unravel the molecular secrets of the subterranean fungus once virulent in these tunnels. We thought their spores merely hallucinogenic, bringing to life our most dreaded fears—manbats, insectoids, mutated rodentia, even abstract concepts of hate and failure taking concrete shape before our eyes.

It was only now, in nearly a fortnight, that we began to realize the true magnitude of the creature's contagion.

Although I am loathe to lay any of the blame on my poor brother, in truth, Leonardo bears some small guilt in this. After the battle, after the burning of the monster by sunlight, we merely accepted the victory as one of many and moved on, shaken but sterner in resolve. Those of us only minimally exposed suffered nightmares for a day or two as the spores ran their course through our systems.

Leonardo, however, having been nearly bathed in the material, suffered night terrors so blinding that he his voice closed tight, his own fear rendering him incapable of calling for help in the dark. He remained similarly silent during the day, regarding this as weakness or perhaps fearing our teasing. He trained long into the night, occasionally keeping me company in my laboratory as an assistant, developing a penchant for coffee similar to my own despite his initial grimaces at the taste.

In the mornings, he rose earlier than the rest of the family, and if he suffered physical exhaustion, it could not compare to the mental exhaustion of the nightly horrors. Meditation ceased. Oh yes, he still sat with our father, dutifully closed his eyes and breathed so calmly that he fooled everyone. He held so perfectly still.

If only he had confessed everything at that moment! For the strange fungus that attacked us did not merely grow plantlike through the underground. Leonardo has told me this. The fungus thought. It reasoned. It even spoke. And they were no mere dream, the abominations that he saw at night, the things he finally described to me in uneasy tremulous voice in the intimate shadows of my laboratory.

Far easier for the mind to slip into unknown realms when unconscious than when the waking mind insists that what we see must follow rules, laws, the known workings of the universe. Far easier to fall into the horror of the uncaring, ceaseless—ravenous—void when the mind cannot reflexively recoil into denial as a last line of self-defense.

He described darkness visible, darkness so thick that it gathered in his hand and slid through his fingers. And then "the emptiness turns into a field that stretches" to the infinite that he knows, as dreamers do, that no amount of walking could ever bring him to its end.

The dream continues with the growing awareness that he is not alone. Organisms of many limbs and eyes and organs that strain credulity float slowly around him, undulating through the air and straining a thousand cilia to twist in space. He described no two alike. Umbrella-like, one moved in waves like a man-of-war, trailing its tails behind it. Another, oval in nature, constricted itself from top to the bottom, swimming as though through viscous fluid. All their internal structure lay bare for him to see as he unknowingly described monstrous but recognizably single cell creatures.

Part of my own destruction lay in my skepticism. Such gigantic visions are impossible—we cannot, simply cannot be on the same plain of reality as such simple creatures. It must be a dream brought on by his assistance with my mutagenic experiments.

I only meant to set his mind at ease, to comfort him that these night terrors would pass and to perhaps create a remedy for him. Our blood is not that of humans. Their chemicals do not always work on our systems. But I could take the remaining samples of spores that I still possessed and craft something like a serum to block the receptors that had clearly taken root in my brother's brain.

An accident occurred. In moving a sample, I carelessly allowed a vial to fall sideways and break against my computer. Spores filled the air before me and, in my surprise, I breathed in.

Was it my proximity to my brother that brought me to his nightmare? Or the fact that he had been so often in its grip that I more easily slid into it?

We did not move from my laboratory, and yet the world changed around us, another layer of reality superimposed on ours like watercolors bleeding through paper to stain the other side. I became aware of the walls becoming translucent, not that they ceased to exist but rather the new reality was so strong that it overcame the wall and forced my recognition of this new truth. The field extended forever, and I saw my brother's monsters appearing gradually, carried past us on the invisible currents that bore them in eddies, unhurried for there was no difference between here and there on this infinite plain. One appeared from behind me, moving through me as a ghost might, and I felt little more than a faint chill through myself.

I felt my brother's hand in mind. In his gaze, I knew that he saw what I did, that he could view this world and that he reacted to the same creature floating by as I did. This was no mere hallucinogen.

"Don't move," he warned me. "Don't move until it goes away."

"What?" I asked, bewildered that he would tell me to stop studying this world, to close my eyes to this vast petri dish. If it drove me mad, I must still stare in wonder.

"Those aren't the bad things," he whispered. "Don't look. They can only see you when you can see them. Don't—"

He stopped as the wind, which I had only faintly noticed, now grew stronger and so loud that it passed by us like a steam train wailing through the darkness. I grew cold, so cold that it stole my breath away, and I lowered my head as he came and put his arms around me, holding me. It brought no warmth but we both took a modicum of comfort from each other's presence.

For now the wind brought with it heavy steps, monstrous footfalls that shook even this monumental world. We could not see the monster around us, or perhaps we could and our minds simply could not accept it. The wind was its breathing and it paused beside us, aware that its landscape had changed—that it was not really alone. That two beings stood there on its plane of existence, within its grasp, if only it could find them. Like the organisms floating by, I believe it passed through us. The chills that struck me were soul-rending. I believe part of my sanity fragmented there. This was no mere creature. This was something beyond me, beyond mortality—this was part of the wind and the plane itself, part of the air that the other harmless organisms floated through. This was the very world itself becoming aware of us and stopping to sniff us out.

The wind faded. The darkness lifted. Once more the lair was just the lair and we were alone.

My brothers, I have never been so thankful for sensei taking us away in pairs to train. I shudder to think what would have happened if Leonardo and I summoned this presence here while you were in the other room—more properly, simply a few feet away on an endless plane—when that sentient hunger appeared.

Because I know for a certainty what would have happened.

I stupidly left the lair to gather supplies to create the serum I now knew must be made. With no time to spare, I rushed to my most often source of supplies, thieving from the storage facilities of the New York School of Medicine. But the hour was late and the halls still so full of students that in my rush to finish I grew so single minded that I did not notice that the darkness had become something tangible, that the rushing in my ears had nothing to do with the ventilation system.

Closing my eyes, I held still, thinking it would pass me by. And indeed it did, and I felt little of the cold dread of before. The wind was not so loud, the presence not as overwhelming.

I did not think—did not think!—that this was not because it was more distant but rather that _it had passed me by in favor of easy prey_.

I heard their screams. I felt their blood splash past the walls and strike my face like a slurry of ice. I heard bones crack and splinter, and I felt the wind warm itself with the life it devoured.

When the horror passed and the world was real again, I found nothing amiss. No bodies. No blood. The students in the halls had vanished as if they never existed, save for a single lanyard and identification card carelessly dropped on the floor.

The news has carried nothing of the mass murder of a dozen students on campus grounds, the sudden disappearances of people that others must care for. It is as if they ceased to exist in one awful bite. Perhaps they had time to scream if they saw the world suddenly turning aware and hungry. Some did not seem to notice before they crunched out of existence without a sound.

Leonardo has said that their blood remains on my face, although I can't feel it. Of course I can't wipe away what doesn't exist in our plane.

So now I develop my hypothesis, unprovable as it is. No camera I own could record the shifting of realities. No device could record the wind. No one can prove what I and my brother have seen. But still...I have a guess.

This overwhelming presence is still a presence, still alive and aware at least as much as any animal or organism. This presence I name the world, for nothing else could be so huge, so monstrous, but if it were the planet itself, it would have devoured us all in an instant. So perhaps this is the planet's hunger we feel. The planet sleeps, and when we move into its dream, there it can move, can breathe, can devour.

In this way, the fungus did not exist solely in our plane. Affected by unknown properties within mutagen crafted by beings from a completely different dimension, this mushroom straddled realities, standing in both our world and the planet's dream, and it grew increasingly aware of itself and its function. It may even be part of the sentient world-creature that devours the little organisms skittering across its surface like bite-sized mouthfuls. The fungus attempted to grow and devour what it could see just as the world-creature devours what it can see.

That is our hope! That is our safety! We are not aware of it, so it cannot become aware of us. Like a cosmic game of hide and seek, we must stay ignorant and hidden for we have no other defense.

The spores, straddling our two worlds, are adaptable. Too adaptable. The changes in reality come more frequently now. They take me by surprise, and so suddenly am I filled with fear that I shriek out, sure that the jaws of a planet will close around me without warning. I hold still with my now constant brother, taking comfort from his arms around me.

We are almost always in the dream now. I move slowly, mixing chemicals. I am sure that this is the right formula, I am certain of it, but there are so many steps and the wind howls past me so that my screams are lost in it.

Imagine the jaws of a monster always at your back, so huge that they cannot be escaped, an enormous black maw the size of mountains, always behind you, always rushing closer, and one tiny thread of hope to hold both you and a loved one depending on you.

My sanity is that worn, tearing thread. My brother I fear is already lost, silent and still as he holds me. He has been my test subject, and I fear what we will discover that I have burned in his mind as I try to destroy the receptors where the spores have lodged. But I must hope that we will be alive to discover the loss, to mourn it, and to celebrate being alive, as much as we can celebrate now knowing the awful reality of the universe around us.

The black of space is an ocean, and every planet but a bioluminescent set of fangs gathering prey to itself, occasionally picking at the detritus called mortals that gather on its surface. The two realities meet, the planet hungers, and we die. We feed it.

Raphael, Michelangelo, if you come home to an empty lair, I hope you remember us. Know that it truly was painless, that we were together in our fear. I hope, if we fail to save ourselves, that the darkness vanishes with our deaths, leaving you safe in the same space that took our lives.

But if it does not...

I admit, my hypothesis is the half-mad rambling of terrorized prey. Planets that dream as they swim the currents of a cold, starving universe? I must be mad. But then how do Leonardo and I share the same hallucination, the same madness? Maybe you will find us both huddled together in some shadowy corner, broken and deranged from poisoned minds.

But if not...if you stand in this same spot where we were, if the room grows dark and cold while strange creatures pass by like ocean snow, then—hold still. You must hold very still. Quiet. Absolute silence is all that will save you. Do not move. Do not move. Do not move. Do not


End file.
